A notification center for progress bars that sounds like birdsong (Interconnected)
— Read on interconnected.org/home/2023/02/10/progress

This came up at a conference I attended at Xerox Parc last century, where a sysadmin had sonified all the background processes running on his network. When everything was running as it should, it all descended into a subconscious multiphonic hum, but as soon as something changed the related sound changed proportionally, surfaced to his consciousness and thereby got his attention. This instead of a roomful of competing blinky lights that were endlessly distracting.

The other aspect of this I remember is that you could layer an infinite number of independent processes, vs the limited real estate of a screen. The hum occupied the room, not a specific device.

No notification sounds required. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Went to see Robert Kaplan at WICA last night. He reminds me of a 20th century Herodotus.

He kept making references to “the elites” and how they consistently get things wrong. He described his own education, at a small Connecticut public university, and his subsequent employment at a small regional paper because he couldn’t get a job with the major papers because he didn’t have the Ivy League education. I think he’s always viewed himself as an outsider, with a bit of a chip on his shoulder.

I wanted to ask him about these elites. I’ve been reading him for years in The Atlantic, itself a bit of an elite national journal, so I confess to having pictured him as a member of the elites. I’m wondering who they are, and how they work; is it like the courtiers of the Ottoman Empire, with various factions and intrigues vying for the attention of the Emperor? Are they all the people who move from faculty positions at Yale and Harvard to positions in the Federal administration to emeritus positions in think tanks like the Heritage Foundation? Who are these people?

Watch the movie “ A Man called Otto” last night. On the way home from the theater I wrote this.

There is a specific sadness to everyone’s life
A child that dies, a traumatic injury, a fractured relationship
Without which we would lose our connection to the ground and to each other
And simply float away.

I wrote this while we were visiting religious sites in southern Spain. I had noticed that tourists in the buildings were either holding their cell phones up high, or cradling them and staring at the small screens. They reminded me of the varieties of religious expression captured in the sculpture and paintings that we were looking at.

The Ecstatics, their hands and heads raised to the ceiling, phones recording the look of bliss on their faces while capturing another landmark to prove they exist.

And the Penitents, sitting, with phones in their cupped hands and heads bowed, reviewing their photos and contemplating their sins: the selfie from the bar the night before, singing in the street. How did I look?

I get a lot of spam in email (and texts, and phone calls, and …) I pay for the infrastructure that allows this to happen, by paying my ISP a monthly fee, my phone provider a fee, … Why do I pay for others to abuse my communication tools?

In the days of regular landlines, the party placing the call was billed, not the recipient. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t get lots of calls from random causes.

Let’s charge a (micro) fee for each message transmitted, to be paid to the recipient’s mail (SMTP/IMAP) provider. For example, WhidbeyNet would receive a small net positive for each email they are sent, and the sender would be charged that amount. Over the course of a month, say, WhidbeyNet’s service cost would be more than covered by the income they get from all the spam that gets sent to my account, and they would then completely scrap their telecom charges to me.

When I send an email, I’d get charged (the same) microscopic amount (everyone who sends mail is charged) and the recipient’s SMTP/IMAP provider credited. At the end of the billing period, that’d be netted against the amount that WhidbeyNet received from people sending to me. Unless I sent copious numbers of messages, I’d end up paying nothing but my ISP would more than recover a reasonable profit over operations.

In fact, I suspect that three things might happen if there was a cost incurred to the sender, paid to the recipient’s provider:

• the ISP would become a bit of a gold mine. The incentive to set up an ISP and string infrastructure around the currently “money-losing” rural areas would be much stronger, and internet coverage would increase.
• Internet access would be effectively free for end-users; in effect they’re saying “paid for by people trying to send me spam”.
• Spam would decrease, because it would cost more to send (and be proportional to the volume of spam sent). So it would behoove advertisers to become more selective in deciding whose inbox to fill up.

This would need to be tied to a mail identity verification mechanism so the right party gets charged, of course, something we’ve all been talking about for a while. And it’s not a new idea; micropayments for mail and other transactions have been mooted for decades, some test systems implemented and their effectiveness and practicality debated. But: no one’s yet refuted the idea that costless comms lead to abuse. So let’s get the people who make money by abusing the system pay for the system, instead of the people who have to put up with the abuse.

The map room is a physical room-size wiki for collaboration from the 1950s https://interconnected.org/home/2023/01/20/map_room

It’s a mixed reality space. It needs the “space” part because it relies on embodiment; as the essay says, it matters where you are, what you’re focused on, what’s in your peripheral vision, what the others around you are looking at.

Seems like a killer app for HoloLens.

How to deal with complexity?  What’s the right model for institutions beyond local/national?  Why doesn’t the corporate model work in this domain?

This paper pulls from computation and social theory to point loosely to new ways of thinking about the world that might be useful in solving the problems we can clearly see.  One of those cross-discipline things where each illuminates the other.

Source: The Internet Transition

Why don’t we use pinch to “expand” and “contract” audio volume? It’s analogous to those operations for visuals. Otoh, up and down are good, too.

This year I worked on fascinating projects in energy, media and health* at Magnetic, and learned many learnings. Tom Whitwell is Managing Consultant at Magnetic (formally Fluxx ), a company that…
— Read on medium.com/magnetic/52-things-i-learned-in-2022-db5fcd4aea6e

I’ve posted things from this guy before. He has an ear.

“There is only what is,” he wrote. “The what-should-be never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it.”

Lenny Bruce